THEY NEVER WANTED TO BE THEMSELVES

By BHARATI MUKHERJEE; Bharati Mukherjee, whose latest book is ''Darkness,'' is working on a new collection of stories.

Published: May 24, 1987

YOU CAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN By Zoe Wicomb. 185 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. Cloth, $10.95; Paper, $6.95.

IN the title story of Zoe Wicomb's superb first collection of stories, ''You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town,'' the narrator, a young ''coloured'' South African woman who is winding up a relationship with a white man, visits an abortionist in Cape Town. The abortionist, a middle-aged white woman who doesn't want trouble with the law, asks, ''You're not Coloured, are you?'' ''No,'' the first-person narrator lies. ''Good,'' says the abortionist. ''This is a respectable concern . . . you can trust me. No Coloured girl's ever been on this sofa.'' After the abortion, the woman counts up the coins the narrator has given her, and, satisfied, ''plants the kiss of complicity'' on the patient.

These connected stories, written by a native South African now living in England, turn on just such real or imagined collusions in racial crimes. The main characters are mixed-race South Africans. They accept their Government's equation of self-worth with racial classification. As ''coloured,'' they occupy a solid middle position, with whites above and blacks below. They long for flickable straight hair and sharp noses. They heat metal combs on primus stoves hidden in back rooms. Ruthlessly, obsessively, they bind their nape-curls or beat them down with Vaseline. Even the weather can let the ''coloured'' down: ''Cape Town with its damp and misty mornings is no good for the hair.'' The narrator, Frieda, escapes these myriad petty tyrannies through expatriation. The deeper scars may call her back.

Race is inescapable in Cape Town. (The all-pervasive classification law ''saves'' one from getting lost anywhere in the country.) A train ride to a girls' boarding school, a bus ride in the city, an overnight visit with an old school friend now a married Cape Town version of yuppie - race, and its attendant humiliations and paranoias, intrude into every ordinary, private activity. Yet the political points are scored delicately. Race is always, in Nadine Gordimer's words, ''something out there.'' Race laws are most cruelly operative when unseen and presumably unenforced, internalized - the test of the artist lies in exploring the varieties of self-imposed oppression. (One is reminded of astronomers' calculations, their ability to plot the exact size and position of unseen bodies from the mild deviations of objects at hand. Apartheid, the white world and the coming racial collision are the unmoved movers in nearly all these stories.) In ''When the Train Comes,'' Frieda, the first nonwhite to be allowed into a previously all-white Anglican school, has to board the train for school in dust-coated new shoes because the paved section of the station is for whites only. No soapbox hysteria here. Not even when, in the title story, Frieda describes the thrills of her unlawful interracial affair with Michael, a blond fellow student at her university. ''We do not fear the police with their torches,'' Frieda confesses; what she fears is trapping the decent Michael into marriage and exile.

Ms. Wicomb's characters - mostly Frieda's relatives and neighbors - do not condone the system of racial classification, even if some of them go along with the segregated seating in buses and the segregated waiting rooms in doctors' offices. In ''Bowl Like Hole,'' Frieda's mother remarks, ''We all have to put up with things we don't understand.'' She forces her child to speak English rather than Afrikaans, because she looks on English as the language of self-improvement. She doesn't expect the English language to satisfy her sense of justice or logic. When she discovers, accidentally, that ''bowl'' does not rhyme with ''howl'' and ''scowl'' and ''fowl,'' she (unlike her husband, an English teacher) corrects her own mispronunciation promptly. A FEW others subvert the apartheid system. In the title story, a maid brags on a public bus that she steals chicken legs from the family she cooks for in order to even out the systemic injustice. In ''Ash on My Sleeve,'' Moira, a beautiful ''coloured'' housewife and mother who lives in a suburban house with a stoop and a garden, regularly provides secret asylum to black men caught in town without passes. In ''Behind the Bougainvillea,'' Henry, an intimidating black man in reflector sunglasses, revives Frieda from her fainting spell in a doctor's office, carries her off to the room of one of his girlfriends, allows her to see the contents of his bag (a revolver, a map and a hip flask), reminds her that he had deep-kissed her as a schoolchild, then makes love to her. Frieda, who as a schoolgirl had disavowed enjoying his kiss and writing letters to him (''Would I be writing to a native?''), now accepts Henry's crudely vengeful justice. She confesses: ''I have always miscalculated the currency of sex.'' Henry is rumored to be both a guerrilla and a Government agent.

Some flee the racial crucible of their country. They settle in Canada - which one of Frieda's uncles describes in ''Home Sweet Home'' with unintentional irony as ''really . . . the land for the white man'' because it is cold and snowy. Frieda exiles herself to Britain. ''I will not come back,'' she promises herself bitterly. ''I will never live in this country again.''